FOR the Ethiopian pilot who crash-landed his hijacked, crippled plane off the Comoros at the weekend it was a case of third time unlucky. Twice before 42-year-old Captain Leul Abate had been hijacked – on domestic Boeing 737 routes in 1995 and in 1991. On both occasions he managed to talk the ”softhearted” hijackers around. But not this time.
”It’s very hard to say what sort of people these hijackers were,” Leul said this week from his Nairobi hospital bed. ”They knew they wouldn’t make it to Australia – they just wanted us to crash. They should be dead. The way they were talking they didn’t want to live.”
For the public, the story of how 50 of the 175 people on Ethiopian Airlines flight ET961 survived the hijackers’ forced suicide pact is seen as close to miraculous.
Leul’s Boeing 767 was hijacked 15 minutes out of Addis Ababa. Four hours later, now 39 000 feet (nearly 12km) above the Indian Ocean, the plane had lost the use of an engine, and its communications had been torn out. Co-pilot Yonis Mekuria had been bludgeoned with an axe.
The hijackers, who had ordered Leul to fly to Australia, ignored his plea to land at the Comoros’s Moroni airport, and instead, one of them, girded by a bottle of whisky, decided to fly the plane himself.
As the second engine cut out and the plane dived, Leul and co-pilot Yonis, bleeding and bruised, wrestled back control to lift it over the Le Galawa hotel and down into shallow water 300m from the beach, where it bounced and broke up on a reef in front of stunned tourists. At least one of the hijackers and half Leul’s 12-man crew were among the dead.
For Leul there is no feeling that he acted heroically; more that he hadn’t been able to save all the passengers.
”I just feel I have done what I should have done – what my profession prepared me to do,” he said. ”Everything I did was intended – I was just being pressured by the hijackers all the time. I knew I was going to make the landing, but I didn’t know there was a reef. It was a surprise to me that the aircraft broke up.”
Leul had circled 65km off the Comoros coast looking for a suitable place to put down – Le Galawa ”was the last chance for rescue”.
Yonis, Leul says, was the real hero of the hour, forcing his way into the cockpit in the last 90 seconds to help his exhausted pilot pull the controls around: ”He was a life-saver.” The two clambered out of the sinking cockpit, found a life-raft and made their way to shore. ”I’m not a great swimmer,” Leul says, ”but I rescued myself.”
Within the airline industry, ET961’s story is testimony to the standard of training at Ethiopian Airlines – this is the first such tragedy in the airline’s 50-year history.
Zukile Nomvete, the Transnet executive responsible for South African Airways, spent five years with the airline, and knows Leul and Yonis well. Leul is ”very reserved” and Yonis is a ”polished young man”. They are among the best pilots in Africa, Nomvete said, and their conduct over Galawa Beach came as no surprise.
The standard of Ethiopia’s domestic airstrips is a challenging testing ground for young pilots, Nomvete said. Many are ”no better than flea markets” and smaller than football pitches. Leul spent the best part of his 15 years with the airline dealing with such airstrips. He also flew a variety of planes before graduating to a Boeing 767 – the pride of the airline’s fleet and one of three it bought in 1984 for long-haul European, West African and Asian flights. ”You don’t just get given command in Ethiopian Airlines,” Nomvete said.
At Ethiopian Airlines the atmosphere this week was one of shock. The Johannesburg office was busy on Thursday ferrying coffins up to the Comoros as the final bodies were recovered. Leul’s colleagues in Addis Ababa were reluctant to comment ahead of an official investigation. ”It’s a national tragedy; no one wants to talk about it,” a representative for the Ethiopian Pilots’ Association said.
Leul, however, is raring to leave the St Georges’ ward where he is being treated for head and chest injuries, to see his young daughters. His wife flew to see him this week.
”I’m not a bad pilot,” he added. ”The difference between pilots is how they react in emergencies. Only death or retirement will keep me and flying apart.”